Biography

Autobiography is a strange genre — a book that pretends to be a life, or at least a shaped account of one. What makes a great autobiography is not accuracy in the strict sense; nobody writing about their own past can be perfectly accurate. What makes it great is the honesty and specificity with which the writer takes on the impossible task of remembering, ordering, and interpreting their own experience. The best autobiographies feel like a real person is speaking directly to you across whatever distance of time separates you from when they wrote.

The Book Renzo autobiography shelf features The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, one of the most influential American memoirs ever written and one of the earliest widely read self-help books. Franklin wrote the book in installments across many years, and it was published in full only after his death. What it offers is not just the story of Franklin's remarkable life — from a printer's apprentice in Boston to a founding statesman of a new nation — but his account of how he thought about self-improvement, work, virtue, and the shaping of a public life. The famous section in which Franklin lists thirteen virtues he attempted to cultivate systematically has been imitated and adapted by countless writers since. Whether or not you buy Franklin's approach to the moral life, his account of it is one of the foundational documents of American self-conception.

Alongside Franklin, the shelf includes firsthand narratives from formerly enslaved individuals — one of the most historically significant categories of autobiographical writing in the American tradition. The narratives of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others are among the most morally serious books in nineteenth-century American literature. They are also, simply as writing, extraordinary — often composed under difficult circumstances, published against real personal risk, and shaped as arguments as much as memoirs. Reading them in the original is a very different experience from reading about them in a textbook.

We're continuing to expand this shelf toward more of the great autobiographical writing preserved in the public domain: Marcus Aurelius's Meditations (which is more a philosophical journal than a memoir but functions autobiographically), the confessions of Rousseau and Augustine in translation, the memoirs of soldiers and explorers, and the personal narratives of writers whose lives were themselves worth reading about. Every book on this shelf is a verified public-domain text. Start reading.